Band director remembered for love of music, students

Wednesday

Nov 28, 2012 at 12:01 AMNov 28, 2012 at 6:23 PM

Mike Wilder/Times-News

If there were such a title as King of Alamance County Band Directors, Eddie Harris would have enjoyed a long reign.

Harris, who died Monday at the age of 68, spent nearly half his life as band director at Western Alamance High School – and, for part of that time, other schools in that part of the county. He retired from Western in 1998 after 32 years.

David Nebrig, an assistant principal at Western, became band director there in 1998 when Harris retired. From 1990 to 1998, Nebrig was band director at Western Middle School, working closely with Harris.

“He started the band program” in the Western attendance zone, Nebrig said. Besides teaching at the high school, that initially included working with band students at Western Middle and, before that school opened in the late 1970s, what are now Altamahaw-Ossipee and Elon elementary schools.

People who knew Harris said his exterior was sometimes old-school to the point of being gruff, but quickly added that those who knew him saw beyond that.

“He had a kind of hard exterior, like a piece of candy,” said Darla Bray, who first knew Harris as one of his band students and later worked closely with him when she taught chorus at Western. “But on the inside, he was as soft and warm as he could be.”

Harris, Nebrig said, was a leader among band directors in Alamance County and beyond. Nebrig said Harris had been part of the band at Cary High School, which held a festival in which marching bands would come to compete. Aside from the well-established festival in Bristol, Tenn., there were few other opportunities for bands in North Carolina. Harris remedied that by starting the N.C. Central Band Festival at Western.

Steve Van Pelt, now a member of the Alamance-Burlington Board of Education, got to know Harris as a fellow band director. First a high school band director in Rowan County and later in Moore County, he would sometimes bring his bands to the festival Harris began. Van Pelt got to know Harris better after coming to Alamance County as an assistant principal at Cummings High School.

“He knew how to get the most out of his students and had great musical ability, too,” Van Pelt said. “He was just larger than life in so many ways.”

BRAY SAID HARRIS was a profound influence throughout her life, beginning when she was a student at Western.

It was a tradition for Harris to conduct the national anthem at the start of football games at Western, Bray said, but he turned that over to her during her time as drum major.

Bray played saxophone, and Harris put her in the school’s jazz ensemble. When he heard her sing at church, he had her begin singing with the jazz group.

“That was his gift,” she said. “As a teacher, he could see the potential in you before you ever saw it in yourself.”

When Harris pushed students to attempt more than they thought they could do, Bray said, trophies and other outward signs of success were a byproduct rather than his goal. That, instead, was about students learning how much they could achieve and what they could become.

“It was always about the kids,” she said.

Years later, Harris helped make Bray a more effective chorus teacher than she believes she otherwise would have been: “Everywhere you look (in my life), there’s a piece of Eddie Harris in it.”

Harris was emotional about music, Bray said, to the point where he would sometimes be in tears at the end of a well-performed piece.

He was known for his sense of humor, once posting on the band-room wall a clipping from an advice column. An unnamed band student from an unidentified locale complained about a band director borrowing students’ instruments to show them how to maneuver through difficult passages. Except for percussion instruments, that involved the director’s mouth on the instruments’ mouthpieces.

“Who turned me in?” Harris wrote alongside the column’s text.

HARRIS’ AFFECTION for young people and his colleagues extended beyond the band program. Emogene Kernodle, a 1971 Western graduate, was impressed at Harris’s reaction when she returned to the school to teach in 1983.

“He remembered me, and I wasn’t even in the band,” she said. “He just took me right in as a member of the family.”

Those who knew Harris say he played a wicked set of drums and enjoyed making music as an instrumentalist with fellow musicians.

Billy Hatley, who plays bass for the Mason Lovette Band, and his sister, Mary Hatley Ricks, remembered coming home to find their father, Elmo Hatley, Harris and others playing jazz music.

“That’s the greatest gift you can get, as a child,” Ricks said.

In retirement, Harris stayed involved with music through bands at smaller schools and other musical groups.